9/24/2004 @ 10:00AM

The Addictive Internet

It occurred to me this week that it has been exactly ten years since I was first seriously ridiculed for liking the Internet.

“This has to do with the Internet how?” was the smarmy question a coworker asked me in the fall of 1994, mocking my enthusiasm for what was then the relatively new cultural phenomenon of sending e-mail, browsing the Web and so on. Another shrill colleague offered the unsolicited opinion that I was “addicted” to the Internet, and called it a waste of time.

At the time I was a young reporter for a daily newspaper in a dusty little college town in southeastern Idaho that the great “Information Superhighway” had seemingly passed by. It was a place where personal computers were thought of as a luxury that only students with good scholarships could afford. In most of the town’s blue-collar households, PCs were considered an impractical, even useless, extravagance.
Microsoft
and
AOL
did not yet qualify as household names in this corner of the world, and my ideas for Internet-related stories were often met with blank stares from editors more interested in stories about the opening of a new doughnut shop in town.

If indeed I was addicted, then I was simply ahead of the curve, as the results of a study on “Internet Deprivation” released this week appear to show. It was sponsored by Web portal
Yahoo!
and advertising agency OMD, and carried out by consumer research outfits Ipsos-Insight and Conifer Research. The study tracked the reactions of people in 1,000 U.S. households to going without an Internet connection for 14 days.

The study was difficult to carry out in the first place–many declined to take part because they weren’t willing to cut themselves off from the Net for such a long time. Nearly half the people surveyed in a separate portion of the study said they couldn’t do without the Internet for two weeks. The longest they thought they could go was about five days.

The people surveyed in this study were accustomed to constant Internet access and generally felt confident, secure and empowered as a result, its authors argue. But it doesn’t necessarily make them smarter. Some were either unaware or had forgotten that they could use such analog solutions as the telephone book to help them reach out to the outside world.

Nearly half–47%–said the Internet made it easier to manage personal and professional relationships. Many said that relationships with friends suffered from a lack of communication, but 27% said they got around that in part by making more phone calls.

During their time away from the Web, their consumption of other media increased: 21% watched more TV, 20% more movies, another 20% said they read more newspapers and 6% listened to the radio more often.

Two other studies on this topic were released recently. One, the Digital Future report from the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, was released this week. The other comes from the Pew Internet and American Life Project and was released last month. Both made me feel a bit vindicated for enduring the derision of my colleagues a decade ago.

Ronald
Reagan
Ronald Reagan
in 1989 called information “the oxygen of the modern age.” And it’s increasingly clear that the Internet is the dominant delivery system for that oxygen, though it’s less clear exactly how many Americans are using it.

The Digital Future report estimates that more than 75% of Americans are using the Internet in some way. That’s high compared to the most recent guess by Nielsen/NetRatings, which puts the number at 137 million, or about 47% of the U.S. population.

A global estimate, this one from the Computer Industry Almanac, reckons that 934 million people are accessing the Net worldwide, and forecasts that the number will break the billion-user mark sometime in 2005.

The Pew study bears out the findings of the Internet Deprivation study somewhat, finding that of those Americans using the Internet regularly, 88% say it plays a role in their daily routines, while 64% said their daily routines would be disrupted if they couldn’t use the Internet.

It’s also turning out to be a huge impact on American media consumption habits. The Annenberg Center’s Digital Future study found that Americans now spend an average of 12.5 hours per week online, up from 9.4 hours in 2000. And that time is eating directly into TV-viewing habits. Non-Internet users spend an average of 16.2 hours per week in front of the TV, compared to 11.6 hours for Internet users. But Internet users consume more of other kinds of media than nonusers, the Digital Future study found. They listen to more recorded music–6.1 hours per week versus 4.8 hours for nonusers. They also rent more movies and go to movie theaters more often.

And yet there are still plenty of people not using the Internet. The Digital Future Report reckons that 24% of Americans aren’t using the Internet at all. Within that group, 40% say they either don’t have a computer or have one that’s not up to the job, or say they don’t know how to use it, or they think it’s too expensive.

And what of those two former colleagues who so maligned my Internet fixation ten years back? I’ve kept in touch with them over the years. Both are not only regular but heavy Internet users, who couldn’t do their jobs without it, and both have long since forgotten their dismissal of the medium they now can’t do without. Funny how that works.